Page 23 of Miss Bennet is Gone

She loved him, and she had never deceived him in her life, and now she sat each evening and built a small false world in ink of Lizzy mending slowly, Lizzy not yet equal to writing herself, Lizzy sending her love, and sealed it, and hated it.

His answer to the third such letter came up by the afternoon post, and Jane read it standing in the hall and had to put her hand to the wall.

He wrote, her father, in the dry affectionate voice that had raised her, and under the dryness, plainly, the first stirrings of a mind that did not believe what it was being told.

He had heard, he said, that Lizzy was unwell; he had now heard it three times, in three letters, each a little more careful than the last, and he had begun to notice that a daughter who was merely unwell generally contrived to take up a pen and say so herself, and that Lizzy in particular had never in her life let an illness keep her from telling her father exactly how unjustly she was suffering under it.

He did not wish to be troublesome. He had every confidence in Jane and in the Gardiners. But he found he should be a great deal easier if he came up to town himself, only to sit by the sickbed, only to see his girl’s face, and he proposed to do so by the end of the week, unless Jane could give him some very good reason why he should not.

It was, Jane saw at once, the most dangerous sentence anyone had yet written in the whole affair, and it had been written by the gentlest man she knew, out of nothing but love.

Unless Jane could give him some very good reason. If he came, he would see in an hour what no letter could hide, that there was no sickbed, that the house was a house in mourning for someone not yet dead, that they were all of them lying.

And if he came, her mother came; that was not in question. Mrs. Bennet could no more be left behind while her husband visited a desperately ill daughter than she could be persuaded to whisper.

If her mother came, then within a day the news would be all over town in the very way Lady Matlock was killing herself to prevent, because Mrs. Bennet could not hold a secret any more than she could hold back the tide, and would not have understood, even if it were explained to her, why she must.

Jane took the letter to the back parlour, where Darcy and her aunt and uncle were sitting, and read it aloud, and watched the same understanding settle over each of their faces in turn.

It was Mrs. Gardiner who spoke first, because she knew her brother-in-law best. “He has stopped believing us,” she said. “Not all at once, and not unkindly. But he has stopped. That letter is a man giving us one last chance to tell him the truth before he comes and finds it.”

“Then we must keep him in Hertfordshire,” Darcy said, “and we must do it without giving him the truth, and we must do it in a way that does not, itself, tell him there is a truth to be kept.” He heard how it sounded.

“I am asking Jane to deceive her father more cleverly than she has ever deceived anyone, on no notice, in a single letter, with everything resting on it. I know what I am asking.”

“You are asking me to keep my father safe and ignorant in the same sentence,” Jane said, “and to keep Lizzy’s name safe by keeping him away from her when she has more need of her family about her than she has ever had in her life.”

She was very pale, but her voice did not shake; Jane’s gentleness had always been mistaken, by people who did not know her, for weakness.

“I will write it. I can think of the reason, Lizzy is mending but the doctor counsels absolute quiet, no excitement, no visitors, that the smallest agitation sets her back, and that she has particularly asked, in her weak way, that her father not see her brought so low, and would so much rather he came for the wedding, when she is herself again, and well, and can meet him on her feet.”

Her mouth twisted. “It is monstrous. It uses his love for her against him, and it uses her name in a thing she never said. I shall be ashamed of it the rest of my life. And it will work, because it is exactly the kind of thing she would say, and he knows it, and that is the cruelest part, that the lie fits her so well he will believe it because it sounds like love.”

She wrote it that night. It was the best letter any of them composed in the whole of the affair, and the one Jane could least bear to have written, and it bought them, they could only guess, perhaps a few days more.

In the barred room across the city, the pressure that day took a form Elizabeth had not been braced for, because she had braced for cruelty, and what came instead was patience.

Lady Catherine made her usual midday visit and found the paper as dry as she had left it, and did not scold, and did not threaten, and did not so much as frown.

She sat and said, with every appearance of kindness, that Elizabeth was not to distress herself about the letter; that there was no hurry in the world; that she might take a week, or a fortnight, or a month, for it made no difference at all to Lady Catherine, who had a great deal of time and a great deal of patience and nowhere in particular she needed to be.

“Take all the time you require,” she said, rising. “I find I have come almost to enjoy our little visits. It would be a pity to rush a thing that is doing so nicely on its own.”

And she went out, and the locks fell to, and Elizabeth sat with the words and felt the floor of her own strategy give way beneath her.

For she had built everything on patience. She had told herself, that first terrible afternoon, that a thing made slowly might be unmade, that her business was to keep her wits and her temper and wait, that time was the one ally the room had left her.

She saw now, with the cold completeness of a sum worked out at last, that she had read it exactly backward.

Lady Catherine did not need her to sign. Lady Catherine needed only the calendar. Every day Elizabeth held out, sane, and steady, and admirably unbroken, was a day nearer the wedding that would not happen; and the wedding that did not happen was the thing that ruined her whether she ever set pen to paper or not.

Lady Catherine had not to break Elizabeth at all. She had only to outlast the date, and the date was coming, and there was nothing on the far side of it that Elizabeth’s courage could reach back and save.

It was the worst hour she had passed in that house, worse than the waking, worse than the barred window, because it took the one thing she had been quietly proud of, her steadiness, her refusal to bend, and showed it to her working in her enemy’s hand as faithfully as the locks and the window.

Her courage was being made to keep her. The longer she lasted, the more completely she lost.

She did not weep. She sat with it until she had taken its full measure, because she had learned that a danger looked at squarely was always smaller than the same danger glimpsed and fled from, and when she had looked at it long enough, she found there was, after all, one thing in it she could still hold.